


7 ≠ 3 (it's 4)

by Vodkassassin



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU - Freeform, Aliases, Emotionally repressed team seven, Fake Amnesia, Fix-It, Fuuinjutsu Master Uzumaki Naruto, Good!Kyuubi, Konohagakure - Freeform, Seal Master Naruto, Secret Identity, Team Seven Family, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, Uzumaki Black Ops, Uzumaki Clan jutsus, Uzushio Village, Uzushiogakure, baby Naruto deserves love, boys we're getting the clan back together, but not really fake thanks to the revolutionary concept of mind seals!, exasperatedly fond Sasuke and Sakura, it's a mud world after all, its for a good cause I swear, kakashi cries himself to sleep every night, manipulative team seven, nerd Naruto, sort of fake!amnesia, they're not terrible, time-space jutsu, trauma due to the apocalypse, triplet Team seven, uzumaki team seven
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-01-22 14:43:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12484004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vodkassassin/pseuds/Vodkassassin
Summary: “Apparently,” Naruto marveled, listening to something only he could hear, “we’re on a time limit.”Sakura bristled. “Why didn’t he tell us before?”“He probably only said it so we wouldn’t spend the rest of our lives just standing here doing nothing,” Sasuke reminded her.“He probably did,” Naruto agreed. Then, after a moment, he added, “We probably would, too.”“He’d get so bored,” Sakura rolled her eyes, lips pouting in mock pity.“He’d spend the whole time trying to make us miserable,” Naruto continued, as if anything could actually make them more miserable than they were now.Kyuubi could still try, though.Sasuke grimaced at that. “Let’s do it,” he decided hurriedly.





	1. Three Indifferent Jerks and Some Mud

**Author's Note:**

> Essentially a pilot. I've had this sitting in my docs for actual years and decided to throw it out to the wolves. Let's hope the wolves like it??

There was a lot to be said about people who just didn’t care. Beings that, at the end of the day, couldn’t, with no ounce of honesty, even be called human. Those were the shadows of the earth, prowling uselessly forever in search of nothing at all; the torn and the broken ones who have lost all semblance of normalcy. Those are the ones who have stared death in the face and have turned around to show it their backs. The woeful, the scavengers, the faceless soldiers. Humanity’s forgotten. The final defense.

 

It certainly was with a sense of finality that they took the head of their enemy. With a single kunai, they vanquished the monster that had plagued their lives for decades. A single kunai had done what thousands of wasted human lives could not. The universe’s irony and wit, at it’s finest.

 

An empty victory is what they had to toast to. If it was even that. In the end of things, all four of them had been just so very tired. Listless eyes staring sightlessly at one another across the battlefield, not seeing each other’s faces more than the faces of all those they had failed. Even their enemy had lost interest long ago. It was with little effort, in the end, that they separated his skull from his depraved body, the skin peeling back and the muscles utterly dissolved.

  
They, in stark contrast, were at the height of their youth. Sixteen, sixteen, and sixteen; all three of them. Sixteen, for how many years? It had been an honest mistake, one that they would rue for the rest of their illbegotten existences.

  
It seemed that whatever the enemy had lusted for was gifted to the saving grace of the world. If there really was any world left to save. There wasn’t.

  
It was a sick and twisted last chapter, the cruel humor of fate.

  
Sasuke, empty-eyed and empty-hearted, curled his lip into a sneer as he tangled in fingers in his ancestor’s long, greasy black locks. He released them, and the severed head dropped to the musty, slosh-covered earth with a sickening and wet gurgle. The three of them stared phlegmatically as the muddy concoction, mixed with an innumerable list of bodily fluids and storm-torn earthen soil, slurped around the face of their antagonist and slowly swallowed him up.

  
“Us, too,” Naruto informed them dispassionately, “if we don’t find higher ground, we will sink as well.”

  
“The earth has lost its life. The insects that had once crawled and swarmed across its surface to sustain it have perished, and so it perishes with them.” Sasuke replied. He wiped his pale, sweaty palms on greasy and torn trousers; smeared with blood and dirt, stolen off of a farmer who no longer had need of them.

  
“It’s dying,” he continued. “We are all that’s left.”

  
“If you can feel the earth is in you, and you are the earth, then you are no longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying.” Sakura intoned softly.

 

She narrowed her eyes at the muddy soil that was congealing about them, about level with their knees now, like it was a passively interesting shopping display and nothing more. “Like a wave that appears and disappears and appears again.”

  
“Soon, we’ll be gone just the same.” Naruto rolled his shoulders. He cast a glance at the landscape around them. Squelching blood of their planet, like a vast ocean of swamp, for as far as the eye could see. There was no higher ground. “So, yes, it is dying. The sea has finally dried up, nothing but sand now.”

  
“Mud, rather,” Sasuke corrected. “Mud, and three insects to splash around in it.”

  
“Consult our resident guru,” she ordered him. “Hopefully he’s the only one of us not having an existential crisis right now.”

  
“Hopefully?” Sasuke echoed dully, turning incredulous eyes on her. “What’s there to hope for? Look around, Sakura! There’s nothing left to protect. Why are you trying so hard to find something that you know doesn’t exist anymore?”

  
“He says he isn’t a guru, and you should never call him that again,” Naruto announced nonetheless, eyes absently closed.

  
Sasuke rolled dark eyes and splashed his way closer to them. The final tendrils of Madara’s hair vanished with nary a whisper behind him, it’s corresponding, headless body long since swallowed up by the hungering ripples.

  
“Our nindo is to never give up on anything, no matter what,” Sakura reminded her wayward teammate sternly.

  
“There isn’t anything to give up on,” he tried once again to reason with them.

  
“As far as I’ve noticed,” Naruto raised an eyebrow at them both, eyelids remaining sealed, “we happen to very much still be here. So, there’s that.”

  
He still twirled that kunai between his fingers. It was their last kunai, between the three of them. Had been for a while. Sasuke tilted his head, and knew without even looking that Sakura’s hands were still trembling from the effort to keep Madara immobile with her chakra alone. He really had just been the brute force, holding the ancient menace down in case he dredged up enough of his own malevolent power to escape once again.  
They’d been chasing the bastard for quite a while now. He was a persistent fellow, even in his lethargy. Or rather, all of their lethargy. Perhaps he had gotten slower and slipped up a few times, aNFL they hadn't caught him because they’d gotten just as slow. The four of them, all splashing uselessly about this great puddle of a planet like toddlers trying to kill each other dissinterededly with pointy objects.

  
It sounded like some sort of joke.

  
It was a joke.

  
“He’s got something,” Naruto chimed in suddenly, and Sasuke turned his head, interest stirring within his gut despite himself, for the first time in what felt like eons.

  
“What is it?” Sakura pushed, pulling one leg, then the other, out of her previous standstill position with a great _schloop_ , _schloop._

  
The blond Uzumaki was silent for a moment, eyes closed. For all intent and purpose, he really did look like he was dead. Just a corpse in rigor mortis, tipped upright as the gooey, doughy sorbent that was the earth slowly slurped him down into its abyss of a stomach.

 

Sasuke felt almost queasy at the quicksilver thought, and he thoughtlessly reached over to pull his teammate- -brother- -out of the mush. It was beginning to reach for his waist. Sakura tilted her head, staring, and then moved to help him.

  
Naruto came back to awareness just as they were setting his feet on top again.  
“You two feeling up to a do-over?”

  
“I’m not feeling up to anything anymore, to be honest,” Sasuke said truthfully, as if his opinion actually held any weight for the endgame. It didn’t.

  
“Conditions?” Sakura pestered. She was an insect.

  
She swatted his arm absently, eyes still trained on Naruto, who was watching them both with unblinking blue eyes. Sasuke sighed, then nodded. He’d said it out loud, again.

  
“Not many, shockingly,” the blonde replied.

  
And it was. Shocking, that is. Sasuke didn’t believe it for a minute. Everything had to have a consequence.

  
“Balance,” Naruto and Sakura agreed, and Sasuke pressed a finger over his big, loose mouth.

  
Yet again. He had no filter. He should look into that.

  
“Give it to us, then.” Sasuke demanded, then paused. He’d actually sounded invested in this; should tone it down, then. His voice continued on, far less pressing. “What is it?”

  
They both moved forward to crowd around him, and Sasuke wondered what they were doing for exactly three seconds before he realized that he’d sunk down into his hips. He grabbed their forearms and allowed them to haul him out again. The mud and grime felt smooth and cool as it slipped easily away from his shins. The soles of his raggedy boots hit the surface with a loud slap.  
Huddled together, Sakura and Sasuke gazed at their youngest member in deliberation. Naruto opened his mouth and explained.

  
It was mostly just a lengthy lecture on sealing techniques, they immediately realized, and groaned inwardly at having been caught in that particular trap. A familiar trap, and they’d still fallen for it. Fuuinjutsu was Naruto’s favorite thing to rant about, and he wasted no time in rambling their ears off in a monotonous, expressionless haze of long words with complicated pronunciations, and equations they couldn’t wrap their minds around. They’d all had to be pulled back out of the all consuming earth at least three times each before Naruto was finally finished.

  
In all honesty (and Sasuke was a painfully truthful person, now), he’d zoned out about three sentences in. By the way it took Sakura five seconds to notice no one was talking, and how she was blinking the sightless glaze out of her eyes, she had too.

  
Unfortunately, they were skilled shinobi of the highest degree, and had retained the information anyway, despite their inattentiveness.

  
“Time travel.” Sasuke stated, much less a question than it was a statement. It made him feel like a parrot.

  
Blonde hair, longer than he’d ever seen it in the past, swayed in tangled, mistreated locks about his comrade’s shoulders as he nodded.

  
Sakura heaved a sigh. “Sounds like a lot of effort,” she said, completely contrary to her earlier determined demands (if it could be called determination, and not vague desperation like it truly had been). “Maybe we can just die, instead.”

  
“That does sound easier.” Sasuke agreed.

 

Naruto prodded their sides a few times with two extended pointer fingers. “Guuuuys…”

  
They swayed back and forth, the three of them, in the nonexistent wind for a few long, silent moments. Or maybe it was hours, or even days. It was sort of difficult to tell, now. They were exhausted, deep down to those bones of theirs that would never grow brittle and crumble apart like bones were suppose to. All they knew for certain was that they didn’t want to sit down.

  
“Should we, though?” Naruto said, finally. He crossed his arms, twisting his torso around into seemingly uncomfortable directions. His spine cracked and popped like bubble wrap.

  
Sasuke cringed, while Sakura only puffed out her cheeks and shrugged. Her own shoulders joints cracked stiffly. Suddenly Sasuke wasn’t interested in moving too much, despite the tenseness of his limbs. One of them might fall off if he turned too far.

  
The kunai was still clenched in Naruto’s fist; tightly, his knuckles were white and the veins in his wrist and the back of his hand bulging. Sasuke wondered if he could even open his fingers to let it go anymore. He probably couldn’t.

  
“I dunno,” Sakura mumbled, squinting off into the distance as if she could actually see something.

 

Sasuke shrugged.

 

Shoulders popped. The Uchiha sighed despairingly. At least both arms were still attached.

  
“Apparently,” Naruto marveled, listening to something only he could hear, “we’re on a time limit.”

  
Sakura bristled. “Why didn’t he tell us before?”

  
“He probably only said it so we wouldn’t spend the rest of our lives just standing here doing nothing,” Sasuke reminded her.

  
“He probably did,” Naruto agreed. Then, after a moment, he added, “We probably would, too.”

  
“He’d get so bored,” Sakura rolled her eyes, lips pouting in mock pity. The expressive gestures that may have once been cute on her pretty features now only looked passively disturbing without any emotion to power them.

  
“He’d spend the whole time trying to make us miserable,” Naruto continued, as if anything could actually make them more miserable than they were now.

 

Kyuubi could still try, though.

  
Sasuke grimaced at that. “Let’s do it,” he decided hurriedly. “It’ll at least be something to do. I’m bored.”

  
“We’re all bored,” Naruto scowled at him, but his eyes weren’t really focused, so the heat of the look was lost on Sasuke.

  
“Might as well,” Sakura added her piece in, groaning with a small amount of exasperation as her two male teammates were forced to pull her out of the mud once again.

  
“‘Kay,” Naruto said, and raised the kunai to drive a deep gash into his wrist.  
For a seal of this magnitude, they’d need all the blood they could get. Sasuke and Sakura shared a glance, before wordlessly holding out their own wrists.

  
Those were slashed, too.

  
Team Seven got to work.

 

O O O

 

So, there were consequences, they eventually noted, tugging at their hair disinterestedly. Long, thick, thready, and straight. Colored like fresh blood. Didn’t tangle very easily, which neither made sense or conformed to the rules of having thick or long hair, but it was nice. At least it was clean. And soft, and really went a long way to keep one’s ears warm when it was cold.

  
And, man, they hadn’t felt cold in ages! The climates of the squishy, muddy, swamp earth of the future sort of all tumbled into a great pot together and made everything humid, sticky, and lukewarm. It had been a little disconcerting, and completely unhygienic.

  
Sakura bent down, gathered some of the icy, white fluffy stuff in her bare hands, and marveled at the way it numbed her palms. She tilted her head, enjoying the way her new hair just slid right over to the side(before, it had just been far too grimy and greasy that it was barely more than a helmet on her head) and spiraled off her shoulder. She was a soldier first, of course, but still a girl. And this hair was fantastic.

  
She straightened, then, and chucked the handful she had with all her shinobi might, right into Sasuke’s face.

  
Blue eyes- -bright and clear and round in shock- -stared back at her as the snow crumbled away from them.

  
Her own pair crinkled in the effect of the smile that was working it’s way across her face.

  
“That,” she informed him, “was for being such a fucking retard for most of our childhood.”

  
Sasuke raised a hand to wipe the rest of the snowball away from his jaw, making a vague face of disgust. Some of it caught in his own mane of vermilion, sparkling underneath the full moon that sat high over their heads.

  
The three of them turned their undivided attention to it momentarily, marveling at it’s beauty. They hadn’t seen any moon in years, but a full one? Unparalleled.

  
Naruto turned back to Sasuke and examined the snow in his hair thoughtfully. “We never did get back at you, for that.” He acknowledged.

  
Then, just as Sasuke dropped his gaze and turned to look at him, Naruto swooped down, scooped up his own handful, and lopped it expertly at the Uchiha’s face as well.

  
“I thought you’d already forgiven me for that!” Sasuke spluttered, but no matter how much he spat and glared, they knew he loved them anyway. In his own, convoluted and twisted way.

  
“We did, but payback is still payback, and it’s something we never got to enjoy.” Sakura informed him greedily, reaching out to smooth his hair back out of his face. She looked the long strands over with loving eyes. He twitched.

  
Turning, the three of them began to make their way down the mountain. Not before an impromptu snowball fight, however, of proportions Sakura hadn't seen since her days in the civilian primary school, before she’d convinced her parents to enroll her in the ninja academy.

  
Such a long time ago. She'd nearly forgotten all about her parents. She shook a few stray snowflakes out of her hair and patted herself down.

  
“Consequences,” Naruto said aloud, bringing their thoughts back to the matter at hand. “Are they really though? Maybe just side effects.”

  
“Most likely,” Sasuke agreed, still grumbling under his breath as he patted down his now very damp hair. Sakura withheld a giggle- -that would take forever to dry! He’d be so irritated. She’d have to keep him from cutting it all off. Naruto would help her. After all, they were triplets now!

  
Combing a hand through her own locks, she presented this.

“Red hair, blue eyes, tan skin. But we still have our old scars, and,” She tapped the diamond on her forehead. “There’s this too.”

  
Looking expectantly at them, she pulled to a stop and put her hands on her hips.

 

“We’re not leaving this mountaintop until we take stock. ‘Suke first.”

  
Sharingan still powerful as ever, they learned as a glowering Naruto regenerated the burnt and ashy stump of his left arm. Except the dojutsu was blue, now, gleaming like a pair of particularly gorgeous sapphires. The tomoes that had spiralled inside of them had also changed, merging with one another to form something of an X; the effects of the dojutsu hadn't changed, so they wondered about that for a bit.

  
The contract with the Snakes was gone, though.

  
So was her’s with the Slugs, and Naruto’s with the Toads. The Jinchuriki transformations hadn't, though, and Naruto could still seal his own thumb away into a scroll without actually severing it, so, there was that lucky break.

  
Sakura had no need of the jewel embedded in her forehead, in terms of keeping up a young appearance. The look she wore now was her natural look; new physical attributes aside.

  
They’d all aged incredibly well. Too bad they were stuck like that, never to enjoy the benefits that old, wrinkles, and grey hairs brought a person.

  
She flexed her arm and punched a thick pine tree right in the bark, and the three of them stood watching it tumble down the cliff-face. Somberly, they turned back to the roots it had left still immersed in the soil, and bowed their heads respectively.

  
Chakra super-strength was a go.

  
“Health checks,” Naruto reluctantly reminded her, and both of her boys flinched away from her as she turned to then eagerly.

  
She honestly didn't see what the big deal was, really; The whole scare about medic nin and how intrinsically evil they were, always delighted to dig inside a human being and twist around their insides, gleefully smirking the entire way. What was that all about, honestly?

  
She wouldn't deny that, yes, something about it was fun, somewhat of a power play(at least when the patient was awake and aware), but she didn't actually enjoy it when her brothers got hurt! Seeing them in pain triggered some deep, primal protective instinct within her. Her rage when they tried hiding their injuries from her was entirely justified. They were completely and utterly pants at every medical jutsu aside from the most basic techniques, so it was all down to her to patch them up when, inevitably, they'd rush headfirst into a dangerous situation (like the brain dead idiots that they are) and ran afoul of a deadly force.

  
“Saaa-Sakura,” Sasuke coughed, eyeing her nervously. Naruto shifted from his place next to him, and the formerly blush-haired kunoichi realized she had drifted off in thought, clenched fists glowing a sinister green.

  
She sighed and let the energy die down a bit, approaching Naruto first with what she hoped carried across as a reassuring look. “Nevermind. Let's take a look at you, ok?”

  
“‘Let's’?” Naruto and Sasuke whispered to each other. “Who else is here but her?”

  
She knew they were teasing her; the sentence sent a warm wave of something through her, and she smiled brightly at the both of them. They shuddered.

  
“‘Ruto, you're up first!”

  
It was a lengthy three hours later that three utterly exhausted(if they hadn't already been) shinobi with completely depleted chakra stores, one with the beginnings of frostbite and another suffering an infected gash across the midsection, all of them dressed in crumpled, muddy farming clothes, stumbled their way off the snowy top and collapsed against an open gate of a mountain village.

  
Luckily, the villagers were friendly, and didn't even seem to notice they were ninja at all.

  
“You poor things,” the village’s elderly grandmother cooed at them as she herded them inside her home. Or rather, three strong-armed men(who likely had grown up working at the local quarry) carefully hauled them in and laid them out on side-by-side cots, in what appeared to be the village ‘hospital.’

  
Sakura blinked glazed blue eyes up at the wrinkled face that hovered over her, mind instantly going back to all the times she'd been dragged into a medical tent during the war.

  
“Frostbite, the boy on the end,” she shoved a hand, as unresponding that it was, in Sasuke’s direction. Felt a little guilty, since she'd been the first to throw the snowball, but it was mostly his fault for not even trying to dry off.

  
She moved on to herself, nodding toward her stomach blearily. The other two had already passed out. “Stab wound, upper abdominal muscles. Shallow, no longer bleeding. Few days old. The shortie there is just-” she yawned, curling in on her side, “-tired. Mm, goodnight.”

  
Voices murmured softly above her, but she didn't hear much. She was out like a light in a matter of seconds.


	2. ‘Ruto the Baby Naming Dictionary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not even gonna edit this but here *shoves*

The village people were nice folk, Naruto had decided. Kind, humorous, gracious. Flighty and cautious, though, so they'd all decided to withhold the small fact of their choice in careers. 

They'd woken in the hospitable medicine house of the village elder, Kumiko-baa-chan, who was quite enjoying the friendly honorific he'd immediately bestowed upon her. They had opened their eyes to the warm sun of a winter afternoon, six days after they’d quite literally fallen across the village, Yukiyama. 

Sakura’s wound was cleaned and re-bandaged with several healing herbs gathered from right there in the mountain. She'd fallen into a rather exhaustive (to Naruto) discussion about medicinal salves and the use of natural oils with Kumiko, always excited to learn about nature-made anesthetics versus its chemical variant. Chemicals worked well professionally, of course, but Sakura’s always had a fondness for home-remedies. 

The mothers and their daughters absolutely adored Sasuke, who’d immediately tied back his hair in a low bun upon waking up. It was a trying process, for a man who’d never once given any semblance of thought toward his hairstyle, so Sakura had rallied the village women around a somewhat red-faced ex-Uchiha to debate what to do with the long red mane, when they all absolutely refused Sasuke’s request to just hack it all off. 

Naruto fit right in with the mountain boys of the quarry, almost going off for the day to help them lift rocks around. Kumiko had put a definite stop to that particular escapade, however, sternly demanding that the three “poor and beaten chillens” rest their woes away. 

It'd take a long while for that to ever presumably happen, Naruto figured, so the boys had just dragged him off to the tavern instead, where the former blonde had proceeded to drink each and every one of them under the table. Then, he'd went on to do the same for the older men who’d been watching and laughing. They didn't laugh for long. 

Before all of this had a chance to happen, however, Naruto had huddled up with Sasuke and Sakura after she’d sent Kumiko off to rally women to find a purpose for Sasuke’s hair(which he was tugging at rather sullenly), for a game plan. 

“New names,” he'd ordered. “We have no idea what time we’re in. Could be way back before the Clan Wars for all we know, but it could also be just a decade and there’re little Naruto, Sakura, and Sasukes running around.”

“We'd never even be able to pull it off, with what we look like now,” Sasuke complained darkly, wincing as he raked his fingers through his hair only to encounter a knot. Sakura immediately materialized by his side to work on getting it out. 

“What we look like now are Uzumakis,” she announced. “I'm sorry, Naruto, but you see it too, don't you?”

“I do,” he’d agreed instantly. “Fire hair, sun skin. A little iffy on the blue eyes- -I did get them from my dad, and we all know who he is. Mom had green. But since there's three of us with blue, they can't really call us out on it without indisputable proof.”

“So we’re Uzumakis then,” Sasuke drawled, tilting his head back and giving it up as a bad job. Sakura tugged it closer to her for better access. “How about first names? Any ideas for a backstory? These civilians are gonna want to know where we came from and, more importantly, why we came to them looking like we’d just escaped Shinigami itself.”

Naruto leaned back against the carpet-covered wooden wall of the medicine house with a heavy sigh. “What about just our nicknames? That way it'll be easy for us all to remember and respond to.”

“‘Kura, ‘Suke, and ‘Ruto?” Sakura raised an eyebrow. “N- -they don't have any meanings, Naru- -” she shook her head, groaning. “We need to get out of the habit of calling each other by our old names. But anyway, it's obvious those are just nicknames, and one day someone will ask what our full names are. What will be say then?”

“Build off of them, then.” Sasuke grumbled petulantly, huffing angrily at his hair. He picked a long strand of it up between two fingers and jerkily tossed it away from him in disgust. “There are a lot of names that end in ‘-suke,’ and it should be similarly easy for both of you to- -kami- _ sama _ , ‘Ruto! How the hell did y- -mom ever deal with hair this long?”

“Dunno,” Naruto replied easily, looking similarly confused as he slowly brushed hesitant fingers through his own hair. “She died long before I was old enough to realize mom’s were actually a  _ thing _ , y’know? Um, Daisuke, Kisuke, Ryosuke,  _ Ryu _ suke, Hansuke, Kosuke, Hyosuke- -”

Sakura snorted at that one, loudly, as she finally got the tangle free. Sasuke pulled away with a grateful and extravagant sigh. 

“- -Kensuke, Ryunosuke… Shunsuke, Yosuke… Just tell me when, ‘Ke.”

“Please don't shorten what's left of what you've already mangled out of my birth name,” the ex-Uchiha groaned. “Ah… Shusuke,” he decided morosely. “Most of those other names mean “good help” of some sort, and I never really was.”

“Oh, come off it,” Sakura leaned over to slap him upside the head. “How about for me, ‘Ruto? Since you seem to have an entire book of baby names in your head along with all that other miscellaneous knowledge.”

“Let me think of some,” the former blonde said almost eagerly, feeling slightly embarrassed for getting excited over naming himself and his friends. But hey, this was fun! 

“You and Sasuke figure out the backstory while I come up with names.” He continued. “You're better at that than me anyway.”

They nodded at him, turning away to murmur at each other as Naruto ran through all the names he'd ever learned, and their meanings. For a friendly social butterfly such as him, it was quite the long and respectable list. 

Just as the two of them were fleshing out the tragic fate of their parents at their births(they were triplets, it appeared, said Kurama who'd been listening in, and the story sounded suspiciously like that of Naruto’s parents’ actual demise), he turns back to them. 

“She’s Yuukura, and I’m Asaruto. Mother's name was Sakumi, and father’s name was Fumitsu. I also have an extra uncle named, if he’s needed.”

“Sakumi…” Sasuke murmured thoughtfully. “... All of our mothers’ first names put together?”

“Sarada, Kushina, and Mikoto,” Sakura smiled. “Fitting. Also, that'll make it easy to remember.”

“Same for father’s name. Fumitsu.  _ Fu _ gaku,  _ Mi _ nato, and  _ Tsu _ nakei.” Naruto sighed happily. “I mean, they were all jerks, but at the end of the day that's easiest to remember. Also, Shusuke, I'm changing your name to Yusuke, because I disagree about both your emo comment and the lettering. You and Yuukura’s names need to start with the same letter or it'll upset the balance.”

“The balance? What balance?” 

Asaruto raised an eyebrow competitively, and both he and Yuukura exchanged a look. The newly-dubbed ‘Yusuke’ ground his teeth together and sulked.

“That uncle…?” Yuukura questioned curiously, pinning her youngest brother with a curious look.

Asaruto blinked at her, then stood up without answering. He began to pace aimlessly around the main room, hands splayed out on his stomach and fingers tapping his abdominal muscles like he did when he was hungry.

The other two shinobi nodded, letting the subject drop, with maybe a snicker or two.

“Anyway,” Yuukura continued, “we sort of combined all of our stories together, keeping the entire Uzu destruction and Uzumaki scattering in mind. Uchiha massacre is the loss of the village; ‘Suke will share memories of the grief of that, just so we’re all on the exact same page. Your parent’s murders, but mom had Kushina’s personality. Dad was more Fugaku, but with less of the Uchiha smarts, and my dad’s subtlety.”

“Their demise also happened a few years later than our birth,” Yusuke tacked on, crossing his arms. “When we were all six. That’ll be about two years before the fall of Uzugakure. We’re also claiming amnesia, just to make things easier on us.”

Asaruto blinked. “What was the point of coming up with a backstory, if we have no memories of it?” He wondered.

Yuukura smacked him in the chest. “Well, we’ll need  _ something  _ to remember, won’t we?”

“Amnesia is a hard bet to pull in a ninja village,” the ex-blonde stated doubtfully.

“We’re not  _ in  _ a ninja village,” Yusuke pointed out. “For now, this is what we’ll have to work with.”

“I’ll place a seal on the more volatile memories, then.” Asaruto decided as he flopped down on his cot again, the sounds of a stampede approaching the hut. Yusuke sank down in his seat, a horrified look coming across his usually blank features. “Set up a matrix to base around our new backstory, and place triggers around it so that whatever we’re gonna remember of it we will… we can do that tonight.”

“ _ Kamisama _ ,” Yusuke groaned, then, as the doors burst opened. Both at the prospect of being subjected to yet another fuuinjutsu rant, and the much closer torture of females and long, pretty hair.

Yuukura began introductions, pointing out her brother’s to the village women coming in to crowd the small hut, and Asaruto fled through the back window with a smothered laugh.


End file.
